Liberal journalism's fickle godfather

Bill Moyers, a towering figure of both the media and the left, has an acute understanding of Washington from his days working for Lyndon Johnson and an often-expressed belief that most corporate media outlets are more worried about the bottom line than the truth.

As president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, Moyers is the rare talking head with the ability to put a foundation’s money where his mouth is. Over the years, he has directed a lot of that money toward Washington journalism, funding liberal publications like the Washington Monthly and the American Prospect and providing an early test of the kind of foundation-sponsored media some see as the future for serious journalism.

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“For a while, Bill Moyers was the only foundation leader who was willing to invest in journalism,” said Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly.

But a number of other efforts have not been so successful. Three nonprofit journalism organizations that Moyers gave initial support to — the Washington Independent, the DC arm of the American Independent News Network of investigative online news sites; American News Project, an online video journalism network; and the Huffington Post Investigative Fund — have all folded. And critics of Moyers say his short attention span and lack of long-term commitment if anything underscores the pitfalls of nonprofit journalism and depending on the interests — and whims — of one benefactor.

“A grant is a grant. There is no guarantee,” said David Bennahum, the CEO and president of the American Independent News Network, who feels that Moyers was too quick to cut off support for his news site. “Having said that, the assumption is, with any foundation, if you are doing a good job, you assume there is going to be sustained funding.”

Moyers says the disgruntled former grantees misunderstand the mission of the foundation, particularly as it fulfills its funders’ desires by spending down its funds.

“We don’t have the means to build and sustain institutions, so we ‘make bets’ on promising individuals and ideas, and hope then to persuade deeper pockets to take up where we have to leave off,” Moyers said.

In many cases, those bets have paid off. Schumann was an early funder of the Center for Public Integrity, now heading into its 23rd year with a diverse funding base, as well as the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Responsive Politics. When Columbia Journalism Review was in trouble in the late 1990s, Schumann swooped in with $2 million, and today the publication is going strong.

“The Schumann money was very important and very useful,” said Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity and a journalism professor at American University.

But in those bets that didn’t pay off, Moyers’s critics see a pattern of fickleness driven by a curious, passionate but famously mercurial mind.

Take the example of The Washington Independent, a website that aimed to blend the faster metabolism of blogs with the substance of classical reporting, which Moyers himself had suggested Bennahum add to his state-based network of journalism sites.

With a $600,000 grant from Schumann, Bennahum hired 10 staffers beginning in late 2007, helping to launch the careers of journalist like David Weigel, now at Slate, and Spencer Ackerman, now at Wired (two of the publication’s former editors, Allison Silver and Laura McGann, are now at POLITICO.) In December of 2008, things were going well enough that Bennahum wrote Moyers that he’d been able to leverage the Schumann money for a $500,000 grant to put reporters on the Obama and McCain campaign planes.

Moyers was not pleased.

“Pardon me?” Moyers said. ‘Spending hard-to-come-by nonprofit funds to do exactly what all the ‘boys on the bus’ were doing? If I wanted conventional campaign coverage, I could have read Johnny Apple in The New York Times.” After the initial funding, Moyers told Bennahum “we’re not considering grants for a while.”